There’s an App for That
Social media and the “sharing economy” aren’t just about being neighborly. There’s money to be made! These stories feature affiliate marketing, mobile applications, and more.
Engagement Ring Search Turns into Shiny Profits
Spanish-Language Bible App Generates One Million Downloads
Lawyer Creates Online Course for Mothers Returning to Work
Army Veteran Makes $650,000 Advertising Apps
ENGAGEMENT RING SEARCH TURNS INTO SHINY PROFITS
NAME
LOCATION
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
STARTUP COSTS
LESS THAN $1,000
INCOME
$850/MONTH
WEBSITE
A search for the perfect engagement ring leads a software engineer on a quest to discover an algorithm for the ideal diamond. Along the way, he creates a business model with shining potential.
When Tony Florida knew it was time to propose to his girlfriend of nine years, he did what lots of guys do: he started researching engagement rings. His girlfriend, Jena, had hinted at what she wanted. The hint came in the form of very specific instructions. She wanted a 1.5 carat, round, solitaire, gold engagement ring. And she wanted it to be “super sparkly.”
Meanwhile, Tony wanted to get the best bang for his buck, so with his shopping list in hand, he set to work learning all about diamonds. He quickly discovered that not all diamonds are created equal—and not all diamonds sparkle the same. He also learned that buying a loose diamond online was much cheaper than buying it in a physical store.
Tony didn’t stop there. He learned all about the so-called 4Cs—color, cut, clarity, and carat—and also discovered that there are other factors that contribute to a diamond’s appeal. Certain angles and ratios affect how “sparkly” a diamond is, as does polish and symmetry.
All this research led him to come up with an ideal range for the diamond to be as radiant, brilliant, and sparkly as possible.
As a software engineer, he saw an opportunity to write a program that analyzed a diamond’s specifications to figure out if a particular diamond would be sparkly. He thought that other people might find it useful as well.
Around this time, he also learned about the world of affiliate marketing, where he’d get paid for referring customers to a business. One of the diamond websites that he was using paid a 5 percent commission on affiliate sales.*1
Tony applied to be an affiliate and told the company he was building a website that would help people find the best diamond for their price point. They accepted his application, and he officially started on the path to earning commissions.
At this point, he still hadn’t gotten around to picking out an engagement ring for Jena, which was the whole reason he got started on this project in the first place. With his program running the numbers, he finally picked out the perfect diamond that featured the most sparkle he could get for the amount he wanted to spend. It was a big purchase—the most expensive purchase of his life, in fact. So before completing the checkout process, he thought about it for a couple of days.
Later that week, he checked on the diamond he wanted and saw that the price had dropped $633. This dip in price gave him the confidence to buy right away.
Tony and Jena went to St. Lucia, where he proposed with the diamond that he had set into an engagement ring. While they were on vacation, he kept thinking about how the price of that diamond had dropped so much in one night. Diamond prices weren’t as fixed as he had thought—and with that new information, he saw yet another opportunity.
Not only could his program help people find the sparkliest diamond for their price range, it could also help them track diamond prices so they would be assured of getting the best deal. He wanted other diamond shoppers to gain the same confidence that he had acquired.
The day after they got home from their vacation, he did some quick research to make sure that something like this didn’t already exist. He then bought a domain name for $10, and got to work building a price-tracking website for diamonds.
The site also included historical price data so users could know how the current price compared to the past. He kept this simple by naming the price categories bad, fair, good, great, and rock bottom, with rock bottom being the lowest price the diamond has ever been. He also added a feature where people can sign up for an account and track the price of a specific diamond. When the price changes, they get an email alert letting them know.
The world of diamond selling is an expensive business, which makes it an ideal industry in which to earn commissions. In the first few months his website was up, Tony made an average of just one referral a month—but that referral often resulted in a commission of $350 or more. He’s since referred sales of more than $250,000 in total, for commission of at least $12,500.
Through the partnerships with the diamond retailers, Tony now has over one million diamonds on his website that people can search through. He’s also finalizing the details of his affiliate relationship with three more retailers, which will add even more searchable diamonds to the database.
You never know when an idea will turn out to be a diamond in the rough.
“This website gives me more than just additional revenue—I feel ownership over it because I built it from scratch and invested so much time in it. Unlike the work I do for my job, I have complete control of the direction it goes.” —Tony
FUN FACT Tony was able to earn a commission on himself, since he bought the diamond for his fiancée’s engagement ring through his own affiliate link. Bonus!
CRITICAL FACTOR
The world of diamonds is shrouded in mystery—a fact that greatly benefits the companies that sell them. Tony’s project helps buyers know more about what they’re getting, and it also helps them save money.
SPANISH-LANGUAGE BIBLE APP GENERATES ONE MILLION DOWNLOADS
NAME
LOCATION
AUSTIN, TEXAS (ORIGINALLY SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH)
STARTUP COSTS
$1,000
INCOME
$70,000 IN LESS THAN ONE YEAR
WEBSITE
Opportunity knocks for an underemployed accountant, leading to a fortuitous project that earns $70,000 in one year from a 99¢ app.
Trevor McKendrick teaches business finance for an online programming school. He began his career as an accountant, but quit his job to move to Utah when he got married. For a while, he found only part-time work and had extra time during the week to fill with something else.
It was during that time that he unexpectedly built his own software company. It happened when he discovered an opportunity to improve a low-tech and simple idea, and then get paid for bringing it to people’s iPhones all over Latin America.
He found the opportunity by looking through the App Store, paying attention to the top-ranking apps. His goal was to find high-ranking apps that were poorly made or had a lot of bad reviews. The idea was that if an app was making money but failed to deliver a good user experience, there might be an opportunity to improve the idea and make more money.
When Trevor was twenty, he learned Spanish while living in Mexico for two years. That’s why he paid particular attention to a handful of Spanish-language Bible apps with bad reviews that still ranked high in the book category. He didn’t know how big the opportunity would really be, but he decided this was his best chance to test out the theory.
The project did well…very well, in fact. In his first twelve months, he made $70,000 in profit, selling the app to users for less than a dollar.
How did he do it? He didn’t know how to make apps, so he hired a contract programmer to do it for him. To be fair, this part ended up being only a partial success. The guy he hired was from Romania and worked cheap, charging just $500 to make the app. However, in the end, Trevor got what he paid for because the contractor left some of the promised features unfinished.
Trevor decided to go for it anyway. He launched the app and it went straight to the top of the charts. Apparently, even a “mostly finished” Spanish-language Bible app was good enough to knock off the other ones.
A month later, he added an audiobook version for $5. In both launches, he did very little marketing, but because he had found this gap—poorly made apps but enough people who wanted them—he quickly surpassed the mediocre apps in the rankings. He began seeing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of downloads a day.
A few months after that, he experimented with making a free version of the app, then licensing content to sell materials direct to users. This ended up generating hundreds of thousands of downloads on its own, but because Apple took a larger commission on those sales, his profit margins were lower.
When net income was consistently around $8,000 a month, Trevor sold the app to a bigger company. The app had been downloaded more than one million times, he had made at least $70,000 from his experiment, and he’s now hoping to replicate this success with another project.
“My tactic is simple: find high-ranking apps that are poorly made or have bad reviews. The idea is that if an app is making money but has bad reviews, there might be an opportunity for improvement lurking there.” —Trevor
FUN FACT Although Trevor had some experience in the tech field, he had never built an app before. His strength was in spotting the opportunity for the Bible app, and then figuring out how to get someone to make it.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Trevor finds apps that are popular but poorly made. He then makes a better version of them, with the goals of replacing the chart-setters with his versions.
LAWYER CREATES ONLINE COURSE FOR MOTHERS RETURNING TO WORK
NAME
LOCATION
WASHINGTON, DC
STARTUP COSTS
$400
INCOME
$2,500/MONTH
WEBSITE
For her first side hustle, a Washington, DC, lawyer and new mom creates an online course for other new mothers returning to the world of work. She then gets creative and finds a way for employers to pay for it.
Lori Mihalich-Levin lives in Washington, DC, where she’s a partner in a major law firm focusing on Medicare reimbursement counseling. She represents academic medical centers, hospitals, and a broad array of other organizations. Lori is also the mother of two boys, ages three and a half and six, and it was the birth of her second child that inspired her first business, Mindful Return.
After returning to work full-time after maternity leave, she found that two children didn’t feel like one-plus-one—it felt like all of a sudden, she had eighty-five children. This high-powered attorney says she was in tears on the kitchen floor more often than she’d like to admit. No one seemed to be talking about how hard it was to transition back after the typical three- to four-month American maternity leave.
She also realized that while there was seemingly a curriculum for pretty much everything baby related, from how to massage your baby to how to puree baby food, there was almost nothing on how to go back to work after maternity leave without losing your mind.
How could this be? Lori wasn’t sure, but in any case, she decided to fill the gap.
The first step was to map out the curriculum. She had four themes she wanted new moms to be mindful of (self-care, logistics, leadership, and community), so she decided on a four-week format. She then broke up each week into five lessons and mapped out the topics that needed to be covered.
With the outline in hand, she got to work—both writing the lessons herself and recruiting experts in areas she wasn’t an expert in. For a lesson on anxiety in new motherhood, she recruited a clinical psychologist. For the lesson on transitioning your baby to child care, she recruited one of her son’s day care teachers.
Once she had the entire curriculum written, she selected a hosting platform and set it up. She called the course “Mindful Return,” pricing it at $99 and including an option for employers to cover the cost.
One week later, Lori was sitting in a meeting for her job. She checked her personal email during a break and discovered that someone had signed up. It was the first of five hundred customers who would eventually join in the first three years.
Mindful Return is currently averaging $2,500 a month in net income from course fees. She now has a course to help new working fathers navigate paternity leave, and is working on another one for parents of children with special needs.
“There’s never enough time in the day, but you can do this—maybe just not all at once. Be patient and aware of your needs, and everything will come together over time.” —Lori
FUN FACT After the birth of her second child, Lori realized why nobody else had created this resource—new mothers are not blessed with an abundance of time, and more often than not, they’re incredibly sleep deprived. She decided to break up the project into twenty- to thirty-minute bite-size pieces, tackling one at a time.
ACTION PLAN
1. The best online courses have a clear target market and provide a solution to a problem. What problem can you solve?
2. Consider the best way to present your material. What do people need to learn to overcome their problem?
3. Recruit subject matter experts to fill in your gaps. If you’re just starting out, ask if they’ll contribute part of the teaching in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.
4. Write, record, or assemble your material into a set of modules or segments. Make it easy to go through, with actionable steps along the way.
5. Write and publish a clear offer for your course: Why should potential students sign up now, and how can they do so?
CRITICAL FACTOR
By encouraging employers to sponsor the course for their employees, she makes it easy for new mothers to sign up. More than thirty companies now offer it, and she markets to these companies directly.*2
ARMY VETERAN MAKES $650,000 ADVERTISING APPS
NAME
LOCATION
STURGEON BAY, WISCONSIN
STARTUP COSTS
$20/MONTH
INCOME
$650,000 IN ONE YEAR!
WEBSITE
A Wisconsin native hits the jackpot through his smart approach to blogging and mobile apps, bringing in multiple six figures with nearly zero overhead costs.
Steve Delarwelle was working at a paper company when he struck gold, earning an unexpected $650,000 from a new side hustle in one year.
Born and raised in the small town of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, he had served three overseas tours for the army before returning to his home state, getting married, and studying computer programming at night.
Outside of his full-time job, Steve had been experimenting with repositioning mobile apps. The work involved buying source code, changing the graphics, and re-uploading them to the App Store.*3
As part of this project, he signed up with an ad company, which meant he would make money off the impressions that his new app generated—sometimes up to $2 every time someone downloaded an app from the advertisement.
Steve decided to start a blog to document his attempt to make money from apps, along with his trials and tribulations. The blog cost him about $20 a month in hosting fees, but otherwise he had no setup or ongoing costs. He used the blog to publish revenue figures for all of his apps, separated out by publisher. From the ad revenue that his own apps brought in, Steve was generating a steady $600 to $900 per month.
Not bad, but it’s not what this story is about.
What happened next ended up changing his life. Steve discovered that the ad company he was using was offering an affiliate program. With no further work from him, he’d have the chance to make more money.
This arrangement meant that if Steve got other people to sign up through his link, he would get a percentage of what the ad company ended up making off of them. He signed up and included the link on his blog, not expecting much.
Nothing happened for about a year. Then, suddenly, one day Steve woke up and discovered $13,000 sitting in his PayPal account. The money had come from that affiliate program he’d signed up for and then forgotten about.
At first, he thought it had to be a mistake—but there was no mistake. Unbeknownst to him, it turned out he had referred a developer who ended up making a whopping $130,000 the previous month, which meant that Steve received $13,000 as his 10 percent commission.
After recovering from the shock, Steve celebrated by paying off his truck within days. He wanted to shed his debt in order to be free to start more projects.
And it didn’t end there…the money kept rolling in! The next month, from the same source, his payout was $35,000, by far the most money he’d ever been paid in a month. Then it was $45,000 the next month, then $60,000, and so on. Before it ended, his highest month was over $100,000.*4
When it was all said and done, Steve had brought in $650,000 for the year. There was no overhead or expense associated with these payments. It was all profit. And it all came from being an affiliate for an ad company he didn’t work for, advertising an app he didn’t own.
With the sudden windfall, Steve was able to pay cash for twenty acres of land and build his dream house. Even better, his wife now has the freedom to stay at home with their two young kids.
You could say this was a lucky break, and perhaps it was—but Steve notes that if he hadn’t invested the time in consistently publishing his blog, or had the foresight to become an affiliate, it wouldn’t have happened. In other words, he got lucky and he worked hard.
The Niagara Falls of money streams eventually ran dry. After about six months, the ad company changed the rules of their affiliate program—perhaps they got tired of paying him an average of $50,000 a month—and the cash slowed to a trickle, then stopped entirely.
But Steve’s side hustling didn’t stop. He soon launched a new business: an aggregate site for remote tech jobs. It takes data from different job-posting sites to find the best opportunities, and then posts them to his site.
This venture didn’t cost Steve a cent, as he used his existing skills in computer programming to set it up. He spends about ten hours a week on the site, and it’s getting about ten thousand visitors each month.
The new project makes $3,000 a month, usually through other affiliate links he displays. It’s not a $100,000 payout, but it’s real money and it continues to arrive.
And maybe one day, he’ll hit upon another jackpot.
“I would advise anybody who wanted to start a side hustle to take a look at yourself, determine what skill you have, and leverage that to the max. Learn about anything you can—watch successful people and emulate them.” —Steve
FUN FACT Steve struck it rich through mobile app advertising and acting as an affiliate for ad agencies. One example of how this works is when you’re on your phone and are prompted with an ad to download another app. If you do, somebody makes money off of that action.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Steve was fortunate in signing up for a program that paid him an enormous commission for a referral, but if he hadn’t taken the step to blog about his experience in the beginning, it never would have happened.
FREELANCE DESIGNER CASHES IN BY POSTING LOGOS ON INSTAGRAM
NAME
LOCATION
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
STARTUP COSTS
$4,000
INCOME
$30,000/YEAR
WEBSITE
After first rejecting Instagram as being “only for selfies,” an Australian designer starts a popular account that earns steady affiliate commissions.
Twenty-nine-year-old Jonathan Rudolph was born in Sri Lanka, but grew up in Melbourne, Australia. As a child, he loved sketching cartoon characters from comics like Batman and X-Men. His love for design was cultivated further as he watched his grandfather make beautiful handmade cards. That experience would inspire him to create and design beautiful things as he grew up.
When a teenage friend gave him a copy of Adobe Photoshop, Jonathan was hooked. He would spend his time after school on his computer designing cars, changing their colors, and adding new rims. He knew he wanted to work in this field for the rest of his life.
A year after graduating from university, Jonathan started freelancing, offering services in logo design and brand identity. He named his freelancing business The Graphic Illusionist and began looking for side jobs. Some amount of work came in every week and he was making a decent income, all while holding down a day job at a publishing house.
Jonathan first thought he could become a full-time freelancer and leave his job. But the freelance work quickly dried up as he faced increasingly stiff competition. Online freelancing sites had attracted more and more designers, increasing the pool of professionals who competed for a limited number of projects. The lowest point came when he was offered $175 for a logo project, and he accepted. That low-budget project would take him three weeks to complete.
Fortunately, he got a much better break that led to a much more profitable project. His wife had created an Instagram account using his business name (The Graphic Illusionist), and posted some of his designs. He was initially skeptical, believing that the social network was mostly for selfies. However, the account got his attention when it started to gain more likes and followers than either of them had expected.
After exploring the platform further, Jonathan found that there were a number of accounts curated by designers with huge followings—but there weren’t any dedicated to finding the best logos on the Web. Having collected stamps and paper clippings of exotic cars as a child, Jonathan saw an opportunity. He decided to “collect” the best logos by walking the streets and taking photos of them.
Posting consistently helped to grow his Instagram account. Every day, Jonathan would post a couple of logos that he saw, and he’d maximize the reach of each post by using the appropriate hashtags. He had done his homework and discovered that even in the popular design space, there were some hashtags that simply had a wider reach than others. Within the first year, Jonathan gained one hundred thousand followers.
With this substantial growth in followers, Jonathan attempted to monetize his newfound platform. He offered to post the logos of companies and charge them for advertising, but that turned out to be the wrong approach. His only sale came from a single design agency, which paid him $200 for including a link in his caption. He continued to proactively send out advertising pitches to companies, but got no reply.
It was only when he changed tactics that Jonathan found a way to get paid over and over. He was contacted by a company named LogoCore, which offered affiliate commissions for promoting their logo design program. At that point, the Logo Inspirations account had grown to 250,000 followers. Within a few days of making a single post that mentioned LogoCore, Jonathan made $250.
This experience opened his mind. By using affiliate marketing, he didn’t have to pitch companies at all. This was the revenue model he would pursue.
With a working model in place, he began to look more seriously at the project. He scheduled more posts on his Instagram account as well as on his blog. He joined affiliate programs from other companies. The income he makes from affiliate marketing sometimes reaches $1,000 a week, and shows no sign of stopping as Jonathan continues to grow his platform.*5
Startup costs for Jonathan’s side hustle were next to nothing. Even today, he spends only about $300 a month for web hosting, email marketing, music licenses, and video-recording software.
For those interested in growing their Instagram accounts, Jonathan has a couple of tips. It might seem obvious, but the most important thing is to make sure you post daily and be consistent, while taking care to only share high-quality images.
If you’re trying to grow an account that focuses on a specific topic, stay on topic. Do your homework and make sure you use relevant hashtags for your niche, and don’t be tempted to use too many third-party apps because the service may penalize you for it.
Jonathan is now exploring the possibility of creating his own products, such as e-books and courses for designers. He’s also started a YouTube channel, which has already surpassed ten thousand subscribers. The ultimate aim for him is to turn his side hustle into a full-time job.
This designer was pleased to learn that Instagram was more than just selfies. When he put in the real work, he received real money.
“For a long time, it felt unfathomable to wake up every morning to see the page grow by a couple of hundred followers. I also remember seeing the first time one of my posts got one thousand likes.” —Jonathan
FUN FACT Jonathan has “tagged” coffee shops and other local businesses in his posts. When he visits them again, the staff tend to call him by his profile name—“Hey, it’s LogoInspirations!”
ACTION PLAN
1. Want to get paid for posting photos? Assuming you’re not a celebrity, you’ll need an angle. Jonathan chose logos because no one else was doing it.
2. Choose a topic that is specific on its own but still connects to a broader community. In this story, the study of logos connects closely to the design community, which has high engagement on a social network known for sharing images.
3. Post consistently and make your images recognizable. Use popular hashtags that relate to the broader community you’re trying to reach.
4. Engage with followers, “liking” their posts and responding to comments.
5. When you have a strong base of initial followers, apply for affiliate programs that are a natural fit for your topic.
6. Once in a while, post something promotional—but not too often! Focus mostly on sticking to your topic and giving your followers something to enjoy.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Before Jonathan launched his project, there were many design-oriented Instagram accounts, but not one that focused entirely on logos.
A lot of people use the phrase “side hustle” to refer to any kind of work they do apart from their main job. But I try to make a distinction: not all “extracurricular” work is created equal. If you leave your office or worksite and then head off to a part-time job, you’re not doing much more than just tiring yourself out
Participating in the so-called “gig economy” isn’t going to get you very far. If you’re dependent on some other company’s platform, you’re bound by their rules and their limits.
Thus, the distinction: A starter idea is one where you experiment, learn the ropes, and hopefully make some extra money. Nothing wrong with that! But if you want to truly create a new source of income—preferably one that is passive or at least sustainable—you need a next-level idea.
Here are a few examples of each:
• STARTER IDEA: Sell some of your unused or unwanted items.
NEXT-LEVEL IDEA: Learn to sell someone else’s unused or unwanted items, and then do it over and over.
• STARTER IDEA: Drive for a rideshare company.
NEXT-LEVEL IDEA: Coach rideshare drivers (see this page).
• STARTER IDEA: Sell handmade jewelry.
NEXT-LEVEL IDEA: Sell handmade jewelry while building a values-based brand (see this page).
For more, visit SideHustleSchool.com/starter.
*1 In other words, for every sale that Tony referred, he’d receive a 5 percent cut. Diamonds aren’t cheap, so the potential for real money adds up quickly.
*2 A headline on her website reads “Offer Mindful Return as a Maternity Leave Benefit and Help Retain Your Top Talent.”
*3 This is a bit technical. The point is that he was able to creatively reposition existing apps, modifying them a bit and calling them his own. This practice is allowed, especially if you modify the app in some significant way.
*4 With such big payouts, Steve learned the little-known fact that PayPal won’t let you transfer more than $100,000 to your bank account. He had to make a transfer of $99,999.99, and then transfer the rest the next day.
*5 This revenue is close to 100 percent profit, since there are very few expenses in this business.